Guest Post by Jim Rickards
Two weeks ago, the Congress passed (and President Biden signed) four key pieces of legislation related to national security.
Three of the bills provided assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. They received the most attention. The one that got the least attention was a mixed bag of provisions, such as a forced divestiture of TikTok.
Included in that bill was something called the REPO Act that authorizes the president to steal any Russian assets, including U.S. Treasury securities, that come under U.S. jurisdiction.
The impact of the REPO Act is limited by the fact that only about $10 billion of Russian sovereign assets are actually under U.S. jurisdiction. Yet the act contemplates that this theft will be a down payment on a much larger theft to be conducted by NATO allies in Europe.
$290 billion of Russian sovereign assets are being held in Europe. The act says that the assets stolen by the U.S. will be contributed to the Common Ukraine Fund.
No doubt, the U.S. will be the most powerful voice in the administration of the $290 billion common fund. The U.S. goal is to use the G7 summit in Apulia, Italy on June 13–15 as a platform for getting the other G7 members to go along with the Common Ukraine Fund and to steal any Russian assets under their jurisdiction.
So these people think that Russia will simply accept this act of theft without retaliating?
“Mirror Imaging”
One of the persistent problems in intelligence analysis is what experts call “mirror imaging.” This is jargon for an analytic flaw in which the analyst assumes that his beliefs and preferences are shared by an adversary. Instead of looking at the adversary as he actually is, the analyst is looking in a mirror while assuming he is looking at the adversary.
This is an extremely dangerous flaw.
You may be rational, but the mullahs who rule Iran are not. You may believe that leaders want economic growth, but Communist Chinese leaders elevate the party over all other considerations including the well-being of their people.
You may assume that Houthi rebels in Yemen want to avoid attacks by the U.S., but they don’t care — they live in caves anyway, so you can’t bomb them into the Stone Age because they’re already there.
Nowhere is this flaw more apparent today than in the U.S. intelligence analysis of Vladimir Putin. In 2008, President Bush said that Ukraine and Georgia should join NATO. A few months later, Putin invaded Georgia, annexed part of its territory and destroyed Georgia’s chances of joining NATO.
Putin Doesn’t Bluff
In 2014, the U.S. backed a coup d’état in Ukraine that deposed a duly elected leader. Three months later, Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine and made it part of the Russian Federation. In 2021, NATO began formal processes to admit Ukraine as a member.
In February 2022, Russia began a special military operation that’s resulted in 500,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers. Some estimates are even higher. Ukraine’s chances of joining NATO are now zero.
In every case, U.S. analysts did not believe Putin would take the steps he did because they thought it might somehow weaken Putin or Russia. That’s mirror imaging at its worst. The truth is Putin doesn’t bluff. When he says he will do something, he does. When he says he will react to some Western act, the reaction takes place.
Putin said if the West steals Russian assets, Russia will retaliate by seizing billions of dollars of direct foreign investment in Russia owned by major European companies such as Siemens, Total, BP and others.
And sure enough, just days after Biden signed legislation to authorize the theft of Russian assets, a Russian court ordered $440 million be seized from JPMorgan.
The escalation in the asset seizure war has begun. Putin will win in the end. Unfortunately, escalation is also increasing on the geopolitical front. The U.S. and some of its European allies are becoming increasingly desperate about Ukraine’s ability to hold off Russia on the battlefield.
Short on Weapons, Short on Men
The recent $61 billion aid package for Ukraine (about two-thirds of which will go to U.S. defense companies) won’t be nearly enough to reverse the tide. The U.S. and its NATO allies have already given just about all they can afford to give Ukraine without jeopardizing their own security.
The problem isn’t a lack of money but a lack of weapons and ammunition. Before the aid package was approved, critics complained that Ukraine was losing because the U.S. was withholding desperately needed materiel. But that’s not really true.
The Europeans could have simply bought the weapons from the U.S. and delivered them to Ukraine. They didn’t. Why? Because the weapons simply weren’t there. Yes, there will always be a supply of weapons flowing to Ukraine — they’re not going to run out completely.
But Ukraine won’t have nearly enough weapons and ammunition to undertake meaningful offensive operations against the Russians. They’ll just have enough to keep them in the fight, which is the goal of NATO.
Unfortunately for Ukraine, the problems run much deeper than a lack of equipment. They’re also running out of trained manpower. Former commander Valeriy Zaluzhny has suggested Ukraine needs an extra 500,000 troops. But they’re having trouble finding new volunteers. An estimated 650,000 fighting age men have fled Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the Russian army is even larger than it was before the invasion, and Russian industry is churning out weapons and ammunition at astonishing rates.
Will France Cross the (Dnieper) Rubicon?
When you add up Ukraine’s lack of equipment and manpower shortages, you understand why the West is becoming increasingly desperate.
France’s Emmanuel Macron is continuing to say he might send French troops to Ukraine. Just days ago, he reaffirmed that he wouldn’t rule out sending troops if Russia broke through Ukrainian front lines and Ukraine requested it.
Well, it’s only a matter of time until Russia breaks through Ukraine’s remaining primary defenses east of the Dnieper River. Of course Ukraine is going to request French troops since Macron himself made the offer.
Would they be sent to western Ukraine in order to free up Ukrainian soldiers stationed there to go to the front?
Or would they send French troops to the front, thinking that Russia wouldn’t fire on them out of fears of starting a war with France? France is a nuclear power. It has a limited nuclear arsenal (mostly consisting of four ballistic missile submarines).
So France might believe it can deter Russia from advancing.
But Russia has already targeted French “mercenaries” in a missile strike some months back (they were likely Ukrainian and Russian members of the French Foreign Legion). And Russia has warned France that it will attack French soldiers if it sends them to Ukraine.
Remember, Putin doesn’t bluff. But it’s not just France suggesting a willingness to send troops to Ukraine.
Countdown to Nuclear War
I’ve been warning about the dangers of escalation since the U.S. committed itself to Ukraine’s defense. Unfortunately, it’s playing out exactly as I predicted.
On 60 Minutes last night, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, “We can’t let Ukraine fall because if it does, then there’s a significant likelihood that America will have to get into the conflict — not simply with our money, but with our servicewomen and our servicemen.”
Ukraine’s going to fall, one way or the other. It might not be this year or even next year, although those are possibilities. But it will happen.
If Jeffries is correct that the U.S. will commit its military to confront Russia directly, then we’re signing ourselves up for a nuclear war because that’s where military confrontation will ultimately lead.
Every major simulated war game between the U.S. and Russia ends up going nuclear in the end.
Are we really prepared for that?
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He’s patient. He let us fuck with Ukraine for a long time, before he made a move.
Checkmate.
I don’t care who rules Ukraine. SO what? They have been passed around since Ghengis Khan. The nerds created the mess, now innocent people are supposed to die for their screw ups? Send the jewish crowd from DC to fight, then I may reconsider.
You really think the cowardly Luciferians who triple mask over fear of a cold are going to risk being atomized?
Yes they are that stupid
I AGREE
They think they can scare Putin into backing down. A big mistake.
“You may assume that Houthi rebels in Yemen want to avoid attacks by the U.S., but they don’t care — they live in caves anyway, so you can’t bomb them into the Stone Age because they’re already there.”
I’ve believed for a while that nobody is going to get off their arses here and do anything until we’re like the Houthi’s. Good news though, we should all be homeless and a year or so.
This country is run by gangsters. If you think any of that money will go to Ukraine I have a bridge to sell ya.
Don’t buy it… My vridge is betterer, buy mine…
Vote moar harderer, vote tRump and tulsi. we need more demoncrap running the repugnicon party.
You think Russia is not run but the same group of gangsters as we?
Hakeem Jeffries is a blithering idiot !
First US State Department lunatics started this Ukraine shit as a money laundering exercise and the pigs in DC along with the Military Industrial Complex were slurping the swill of cash as ethnic Russians in Ukraine voted against Washington DC’s bull shit ! The DC State Department lost so they created a coup and 15,000 ethnic Russians were murdered by the covertly endorsed Coup . The surviving population of Russians pleaded for Moscow to step in and stop the Nazi Ukraine military battalion from killing more of them .
Well here we are idiots in DC financing idiots in Ukraine who are buying yachts in the Mediterranean and mansions far away from Ukraine as 500,000 Ukraine soldiers are dead
let’s check who donates to the campaign coffers of all the DC lunatics that fund Ukraine
OH ITS PUTIN just ask Hillary or Victoria Nuland
This was a bottomless crock of shit, justino.
He can’t respond, the taste of bloody schmeckle has him verklempt
The Ukraine Mess That Nuland Made
Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s regime change without weighing the likely consequences.
As the Ukrainian army squares off against ultra-right and neo-Nazi militias in the west and violence against ethnic Russians continues in the east, the obvious folly of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy has come into focus even for many who tried to ignore the facts, or what you might call “the mess that Victoria Nuland made.”
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs “Toria” Nuland was the “mastermind” behind the Feb. 22, 2014 “regime change” in Ukraine, plotting the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych while convincing the ever-gullible US mainstream media that the coup wasn’t really a coup but a victory for “democracy.”
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.
To sell this latest neocon-driven “regime change” to the American people, the ugliness of the coup-makers had to be systematically airbrushed, particularly the key role of neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalists from the Right Sektor. For the US-organized propaganda campaign to work, the coup-makers had to wear white hats, not brown shirts.
So, for nearly a year and a half, the West’s mainstream media, especially The New York Times and The Washington Post, twisted their reporting into all kinds of contortions to avoid telling their readers that the new regime in Kiev was permeated by and dependent on neo-Nazi fighters and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who wanted a pure-blood Ukraine, without ethnic Russians.
Any mention of that sordid reality was deemed “Russian propaganda” and anyone who spoke this inconvenient truth was a “stooge of Moscow.” It wasn’t until July 7 that the Times admitted the importance of the neo-Nazis and other ultra-nationalists in waging war against ethnic Russian rebels in the east. The Times also reported that these far-right forces had been joined by Islamic militants. Some of those jihadists have been called “brothers” of the hyper-brutal Islamic State.
Though the Times sought to spin this remarkable military alliance – neo-Nazi militias and Islamic jihadists – as a positive, the reality had to be jarring for readers who had bought into the Western propaganda about noble “pro-democracy” forces resisting evil “Russian aggression.”
Perhaps the Times sensed that it could no longer keep the lid on the troubling truth in Ukraine. For weeks, the Right Sektor militias and the neo-Nazi Azov battalion have been warning the civilian government in Kiev that they might turn on it and create a new order more to their liking.
Even ultra liberal Saloon admitted it was Obama, Clinton and Nuland behind the coup and resulting mess. You are a total tool and fool.
Jeffries is Psycho. He was talking about how the democrats are protecting our freedoms. Not one word out of his mouth resembles the truth.
Yeah Obama’s and Clinton’s little coup against a DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED GOVERNMENT IN UKRAINE lost the Crimea. Biden could have kept Ukraine independent and just gave up the Donbas with negotiations to end the war, but Biden and Zelenskyy thought they could beat Russia, now Ukraine will end up part of Russia again.
The US won’t have a nuclear war with Russia for years yet. Putin will likely gain control, not only of all Ukraine, but there will be a political and military defection of Germany and most of Eastern Europe NATO to Russia. I think France has a definite chance of having Paris alone nuked, and becoming a UN occupied territory. Both France’s and the UK ambassadors were put on notice in Moscow the other day that Russia could strike any of their military anywhere on the planet, not just Ukraine, if they did not withdraw troops and long range missiles that would be used on Russian soil as strikes. The US is about to lose most of its NATO allies in Europe, and the Central Banks there will gladly pay Russia back in 2025, in my opinion.
What’s it going to be, Mr. Putin, are you going to push the button, or just talk us to death?
It’s like watching the play that never ends. Are their any legitimate world leaders left? Apparently not. Too bad, we could benefit greatly if someone who is not in the club would take out the trash.
That might be the only way to get rid of all the migrants.
It’s all about money. Send those obsolete weapons to Ukraine and replace them with even more expensive weapons. Every countries MIC wants in on the scheme. All it takes is a lack of a soul.
The fact that the world is starting to see Putin as the adult in the room must make the deep state cabal collectively fill it’s diaper. I too believe Putin doesn’t bluff…when the first Kinzal hits a Western capital even the neo-con morons will realize that fact.
“Nukes”. Lol. Lol. Government propaganda. No independent agency has ever verified their existence. Science doesn’t support them as being possible.
Why do we sequester nuclear fuel in rods that prevent critical mass?
You must have missed med.call today.
Time to end this murderous and petty thief and kleptomaniac. Killed 120+ of journalist plus stole Superbowl Ring from that businessman showing it to him. Return the ring and all is forgiven.
Putin, the good guy?
Are you kidding me?
He is a Globalist asset,…
He plays the Globalist game.
Yep, Putin is in on it as much as the rest.
No one who uses botox is serious.